The photograph was covered in blood. It was splattered along an entire edge, a thick, crusty covering where it had lain in the puddle left by the cooling body of one Thom Sigur, artist. He'd been killed — that much was clear — stabbed twenty times in the face. The knife that was nowhere to be found, same as the perpetrator. The only trace of the crime was the crimson ruin of Sigur's face.
I sighed. "Is there anything else, maybe something the guys already bagged? Because the scene is as clean as it could be, and this photograph seems entirely unrelated."
"Look closer," Ian Jensen said. He had that irritating I'm-unhelpful-because-I-don't-want-to-bias-you tone in his voice. "Tell me whether my hunch is right."
I took a closer look. Grainy, blurry image, with colours as pale as a goth three days after his death. "My three-year-old nephew could have taken a better picture with a plate of silver nitrate and a box with a hole in it."
"Not the style, the subject."
"Camera was way too close. I can only see the back of a random dude's jacket, a part of the back of his head, and over his left shoulder, a small patch of sky. Can't even tell if it's clear or clouded, to be honest."
Ian nodded. "Anything else?"
"Suits are too damn timeless. If the picture weren't printed on modern photo paper, I couldn't even tell whether it was from this century."
Ian nodded again. "Of course, a developed roll of film can be stored quite a while before developing the picture, to say nothing of storing a digital copy."
"You're saying it's older?" I looked at the picture again. "Could be. How old?"
"August 28, 1963."
"Bullshit. Where did that number come from?"
The wrinkles around Ian's eyes deepened. He smiled with his eyes, but kept his mouth still, as always when he was pleased with himself. "It's Martin Luther King."
I looked again. "I mean, it sure could be. Could also be every other black dude with short hair in a suit jacket."
"I'm sure. Do you know why?"
"The art," I said. Thom Sigur was famous for his paintings of historical situations from unexpected angles.
"Exactly," Ian said.
"So you say it's a reference image for his next painting. Not unlikely, given that next year is the eightieth anniversary of that. What does this have to do with the situation?"
"Not so quick," Ian said. "First, please tell me why what I'm saying is impossible."
"There was no camera behind MLK," I guessed.
"Correct! At least, not at that angle. And why would there be? It's a terrible angle to take a picture from."
Another second passed while I processed the implications. "It has to be staged, then. Hire an impersonator, let him watch the video of the speech and the rest should be easy, especially considering that the picture is so terrible that almost anyone could pass for MLK. Why does any of this interest us?"
"The picture was found under the bed. Forensics is pretty sure it has been there for a really short time, based on the dust. The puddle of blood makes it hard to tell exactly, but the picture likely got there just minutes before Thom's bodily fluids."
"He dropped it when he confronted the attacker, then."
"That's what I suggested to the forensics guys as well." Ian's eyes were full-on grinning now. "But they told me that the way the dust under the picture had been disturbed made that unlikely. More likely was that someone had placed the picture there. And why put a picture under the bed?"
"To hide it in a hurry."
The smile reached Ian's lips. "Exactly! Which would mean that at least Thom thought that whoever came to meet him would be interested in that picture, and that he was surprised by the arrival, because he would have hidden it more carefully otherwise. But why hide a badly-taken re-enaction of a historical event? Which part of it would be interesting?"
"Anything really," I said, stalling for time as I tried to keep up with Ian. He had always been a fast thinker. "He wanted to keep his next painting secret, or maybe he'd want to hide that he uses references at all, or maybe... Maybe the murderer would have wanted to get rid of the image."
"Because he could be seen on it!"
I shook my head in disbelief. "Thrilling story, really is, but tenuous as all hell."
"Ah, but you didn't hear what the superintendent said to me when I came to the crime scene." Ian put on a gruff voice. "We need a lead on this steaming pile of shit, we need it yesterday, and fuck plausibility."
"Well," I said. "It's a lead alright. Let's see whether Sigur hired any actors or models recently."
As so often happened, the lead went nowhere. Sigur hadn't hired anybody, and there was no one among his friends and acquaintances who could have pulled off a convincing MLK. Ian wasn't even disappointed; he was used to it by now. The more clever a theory, the less likely was it to pan out.
Half a year later, Ian retired from police work and immediately put out a book. Turned out the old bastard had been working on his memoirs the entire time, stuffed them full with confidential police information, and got them out to the presses as soon as he could. The police department got into a hell of a fight with him, and that fight went legal. As such affairs do, it dragged on, and when the media got wind, the book sky-rocketed up the bestseller lists. Ian made out like a bandit, and clever as he was, he had probably planned it like this from the beginning.
Then, a year and change after Sigur's murder, Ian got shot to death. The courtroom battle petered out, remaining copies of the book were recalled. As Ian hadn't left any heirs, there was no one to protest when the police department collected a thick slice of his profits in court.
And that put a nice bow on it, except that there were now two unsolved murders, and it didn't take a genius to figure out that there might be a connection. Cynic that I was, I could have called that a coincidence and moved on. What I couldn't dismiss as easily was the photo album of blurry, badly-taken pictures the police found in a safe in Ian's attic.
Which was how I came to once again stare at pictures that were more Rorschach blot than photograph at the behest of a colleague, a year and a month after Ian had first pushed Sigurd's final photo into my face.
"Well," I said to the superintendent. "Did Ian take up photography in his old age?"
"God, I hate you. You take half an hour to come up with a retort and then think you're so fucking glib. Jensen and you were thick as thieves. You know what these pictures are and I know you know, so cut to the chase."
I shrugged. "No idea, sir. Ian went no-contact after he poisoned the well at the department. Inconvenient, too, given that I could have used someone to vent, what with the other guys bearing down on me. Blaming me as if I had held Ian on a leash and let him slip."
"Fuck. That means we're back to his theory."
"His theory." I took a second to organize my thoughts. "You mean the MLK thing?"
"King, yes. And Lincoln, Washington, Louis XVI, Henry VIII, Napoleon, Hitler, everyone who ever talked his way into a history book. A sticky note with a name on each of the pictures, though forensics took them away already, and matched them all to Jensen's handwriting."
"Ah," I said, still reeling at the list of names. "Like the paintings."
"You do remember."
"Sigur's paintings of historical figures. Those are all names of people he painted, and Ian matched them to the photographs. Didn't see much of a resemblance, but that's just like the MLK one, too." Another moment while I processed that. "Where did Ian get that album?"
"An auction last month. Estate of the late Thom Sigur, and Jensen bid half the profits from his book on it. He needed the money, given that someone was almost as hell-bent on getting it as he was."
"Well," I said. "I assume you arrested the other bidder already."
The superintendent's sour look was worth more than a thousand words.
"You... tried to."
The look intensified.
"You don't have the slightest clue who they are."
"Don't you dare sound so fucking smug! You wouldn't have gotten one fucking micron further! The asshole covered his tracks like a fucking ninja. Bid half a million dollars without leaving so much as a single fucking fiber of a paper trail. Not that it would have helped much, given that Ian would have been just as anonymous to the murderer. Fucking crypto auctions. And Ian is just as bad. A day after getting the pictures, he burns his entire cabinet of notes, as if he knew he was getting killed and wanted to fuck us over one last time."
"Ah," I said, stalling again while I frantically thought. "So you... came to my door hoping I had some secret information direct from Ian, and now that I burst that bubble you're out of leads."
Then I thought some more in the silence that followed. Important decisions called for some deliberating, and I had to get this one done before the conversation ended.
When I hadn't said anything for a minute, the superintendent got up to leave.
"Wait," I said.
"You remembered something?"
"No, sir. I'd like to join the investigation."
"And why the fuck would I allow someone who's so obviously connected to the case to join my fucking investigation?"
"'Cause it sure looks like they offed Ian because of his connection to the pictures, and he wrote at length about his theory in his memoirs, and he wrote about our discussion of it, which means that I have a connection to the pictures."
"You think they killed him because of his theory?"
I shrugged. "It's not impossible. And I don't like that phrase, "not impossible", when it's about me getting murdered."
"I'll think about it," the superintendent said, but I didn't exactly care what he thought. As far as I was concerned, I was on the investigation.
Ian was a storybook detective, which I guess was how he sold his memoirs. Real Sherlock Holmes type, except for the cocaine. Nothing in his head but the current case and his quirky theories on it, always three steps ahead of everyone. They were often wide steps, and wild ones, rarely correct. That, too, was how he sold his memoirs: he repeatedly fell on his face in the most elaborate way possible, and that could be funny as hell.
So why did a failed genius detective get murdered? The storybook answer was because he was too close to solving a case. In real life, it was never that easy, because there were far too many possible reasons for people to kill each other. But I ran with the thought because it was what Ian would have done, and since Ian had gotten me into this mess, there was some symmetry in him getting me out of it again.
The criminal killed the artist, didn't find the photograph, and hoped everything was over and done with. They waited for the auction to get rid of the remaining photographs, and to their surprise, they got outbid to the point that it became the most expensive item of the artist's estate. Which meant that someone had to be hot on their tracks and needed to be dealt with. Time for the criminal to dig up everything related to the case, including that suddenly-famous book written by one of the policemen on the investigation. Reading the book, it was obvious that the author was still interested in the pictures and had the money to buy them, which made them the most obvious suspect, which meant that it was time to get rid of them.
So far, so good, but it was more of a story than an explanation, i.e. tenuous as all hell, but that wouldn't have stopped Ian, and so, for the moment, it didn't stop me.
Which meant it was time to deduce. Given the story, what followed? Well, it reinforced the idea that the killer had felt threatened by the picture left in Sigur's apartment. It also added the other pictures to the equation, which each (badly) depicted different historical figures. By that thinking, the idea that the killer had been the model for the picture was straight out. And while it was possible that the killer just had a clear connection to the models for all pictures, that seemed unlikely. The most plausible connection that many people could have had was through some kind of agency, and there had been no record of anything like that on Sigur's books.
If the killer hadn't been the model for the pictures, why had he felt threatened by them? Who else could have been involved in them? I went through the list in my head. There were the models, the people supplying props, the people scouting out fitting scenery, which had been very impressive in some cases...
Then it hit me. Those were simply too many people to keep everything secret. Sigur couldn't possibly have arranged such a large number of authentic historical re-enactments for his paintings and kept everything secret. Which means he got them from someone else, some kind of middle man.
I had taken part in the research for the original case, and even a year later, I remembered how we had tried to find services that sold pictures of historical re-enactments. There was nothing on the books, at least nothing Sigur could have had any plausible connection to. That meant he had met the middle man privately, and we hadn't found any sign of someone like that when poring over Sigur's private communications.
Which meant that there was no paper trail and I was stranded again without a lead in sight. Everything I had learned from Ian's death hadn't done anything but make my only hypothesis even harder to justify. Which meant I went way wrong somewhere, but I had no clue where to start with a new hypothesis, so I put it to rest.
"You're not going to be on the investigation." The superintendent's gruffness was especially thick today.
"I'm surprised you're telling me personally. Probably means you still need something from me. So you have a question because of something new which came in, and judging by your mood, it's either complicated by itself or something which complicates the case." I watched his face turn sour and grinned. "Or both, apparently."
"Fuck you. You're insufferable enough to make me regret my decision to keep you in the know on this."
I put my grin away. "Sorry, sir. Please do tell."
"'Please do tell'?" He scoffed. "Forensics got a DNA match. We got the guy, and regardless of what his massive pain-in-the-ass of a lawyer may say, there's no doubt he shot Ian. He's a professional, and the more we look at the murder, the more it looks like a professional job."
"So... the complication is that you can't get at his client."
"We couldn't even trace the payment. The one irregular payment in his account was fucking untraceable, and I'd bet that any contact he had with his client was just as anonymous."
I frowned. This was the moment where I could have shared my hypothesis of the events, but there was something I needed to check first.
"When exactly was that payment?"
"Two weeks before the auction."
I juggled dates for a second. "So... the killer pays a hitman just about a year after he killed Sigur. That sort of thing doesn't tend to happen without a reason, which meant the auction wasn't the reason for Ian's death. The book he wrote was enough, then?"
"Possible," the superintendent said. "But you're guessing. What do you know?"
"All it tells us is that the murderer kept tabs on the case. It did hit the media again when Ian's book blew up, even though it must have been only a footnote in that shitstorm."
"Don't you fucking remind me."
"Doesn't explain anything anyway. The media circus had long died down again at the time of the payment. Why delay so long?" I needed time to think about how all of this fit with my hypothesis. And the sad truth was, it didn't at all. There was just nothing special about the day the hitman had been paid, except for the fact that it was just after the anniversary of Sigur's murder, which didn't mean anything at all to me. It was just as likely to be a coincidence, and coincidences were the opposite of leads.
"There's another thing," the superintendent said. "Forensics did some work on the photos themselves. They're not printed, but developed."
"Old school."
"Fucking antique, and amateurishly done. The good thing is that it allowed us to chemically date them, and each and every photo was shot on the anniversary of whatever it depicted."
"That's not too surprising. After all, Sigur did like to release his paintings on anniversaries."
"Think for a second. Why would he take reference pictures a year before the painting was due?"
"Of course he wouldn't need them that early." Anniversaries again. Ian got killed a year after Sigur's death, and Sigur somehow got his hands on perfect reproductions of historical events exactly on their anniversaries.
I shook my head as if that could get rid out of the wild theories it was spinning. "Can you get me the pictures? Just scans of them would be enough."
"I could." The superintendent sounded suspicious. "So you have an idea."
"No," I lied. "But I might get one."
When we had started investigating Sigur's death, we had looked into just about anyone he had ever known. There had been a lot of people; he was famous, interesting, and an artist, which made him the sort of person to get invited to just about everything. And the people he spent time with were similar to him: creatives, intellectuals, people leading interesting lives. Lives too interesting to fully investigate, even if there hadn't been armies of lawyers at every juncture.
Still, there had been one in particular I remembered now. Liu Wei, optical physicist, misanthrope, and perhaps the most stubborn one when it came to his privacy. We got nothing out of him except the water-tight alibi that he had been on the other side of the world when Sigur had been murdered. His communication with Sigur had been entirely encrypted; we could barely tell that they had talked to each other. And then, perhaps a month after Sigur's death, Wei had gone missing.
Forensics had scanned each photo into its own file and sorted them chronologically, which made my job easier. I scrolled through them starting from the least recent, and found what I needed on May 6, 1937. The Hindenburg disaster. It was the most puzzling image in the file. There were more than enough known photographs of it, but somehow, Sigur had gotten his hands on a unique angle. No matches, not in any of the many image databases. Stranger still, the image was all kinds of fucked up. The light from the fire somehow didn't register on the camera, but the smoke was there. Fire without light was a strange sight, but the picture was altogether too dark to make much of it. No wonder that Sigur hadn't painted it.
Now that I knew what I was looking for, it was easy to find strange lighting. Fire light was invisible on camera, as were lamps, both incandescent bulbs and LEDs. In the few modern pictures, all screens were dark. It wasn't easy to make the connection; Sigur had avoided pictures of artificially-lighted occasions, probably because he knew they wouldn't be usable. Which meant that the pictures had been taken with a camera that only registered photons from the sun, something I would have thought impossible.
Which was where Liu Wei entered the picture, because he was the only one of Sigur's acquaintances that had any connections to anything like this. And if Wei had built the camera, it was the darkest of dark horses. No one had any chance of understanding the exotic shit physicists messed with these days, which meant no one knew anything about it. And if there was an unknown that large, I couldn't discount any hypothesis, not even my most outrageous one.
I called the superintendent. "Sigur took the pictures himself."
"How the fuck do you know that?"
"The camera he used is a special make, and he wouldn't trust anyone with it. Except Liu Wei, maybe, but Wei doesn't have a shred of artistic talent, and Sigur knows that."
"Liu Wei? Why him of all —"
"Photons. I'll explain later. Sigur would have developed the pictures himself for the same reason, which is part of why they're so shitty. The question is where Sigur developed them, because there was nothing like a darkroom in his house."
There was a moment of silence on the other side of the phone, then: "What do you want?"
"Search for buildings rented by or belonging to Liu Wei, especially near Sigur's house."
"Why would Wei have another house? He never leaves the one he has."
"Just do it. It's got to be mentioned on his taxes. And if possible, don't alert him. He's a suspect."
"Now who's the fucking supervisor here —"
I cut him off. He would have wanted me to explain, but I couldn't. Not without being taken for a madman, that is. But I had searched through every dead end, and whatever remained, however impossible, was the only lead I had.
"There is one," the supervisor said without preamble. I understood immediately.
"Where is it?"
"Outside the city. Wei bought it twenty years ago, a few years before Sigur even had a career."
"Let's get a warrant."
"No need. It burned down."
"It burned down?" We were too late. "When?"
"Yesterday."
"Was there anything —"
"Jack shit. Even the carpet had been ripped out before burning the whole thing."
"Arson?"
"Possible. But it's too soon to say."
"It wasn't Wei," I said.
"How the fuck do you know that?"
"I assume that he broke in there just after he got missing, which would have been a year and two days ago. He wouldn't have wanted to leave all his equipment lying around, but putting it on fire would have raised more attention. All kinds of unnecessary. Yesterday the killer got wind that the house was connected to Liu Wei, and because they couldn't be sure whether Liu Wei had left any traces behind, they decided to make sure."
"This is where you tell me what the fuck you're thinking."
"One condition," I said. "What I'm telling you right now never gets put on paper."
"The fucking press? No one wants that."
"Paper," I said. "Not newspaper. I don't ever want it printed or even hand-written anywhere. If you have to take notes, do it on a screen."
There was a pause. "Alright."
"Let me start by saying it's extremely unlikely, but it's the one lead we have. Sigur's pictures have fucked-up lighting. It's as if whatever camera he used just ignored all light that didn't come from the sun."
The superintendent scoffed. "That doesn't make any fucking sense. Unless you're staring at the sun or a mirror, the photons that reach your eyes have been absorbed and re-emitted. You wouldn't see anything on the pictures."
"If you want a physical explanation, ask Liu Wei. Good luck getting him to tell you anything, though."
"Why him?"
"He's the only one Sigur knew that could have built anything like that camera."
"Okay," the superintendent said. "I'll have someone look at the pictures."
"Don't forget —"
"Only screens. So that the camera can't take a picture, right? Though I don't know why you're worried about that."
"Think about it," I said, and hung up.
The arson sealed it. Wei hadn't done it, I was sure, and the timing was suspicious. Therefore, the killer was someone else, and he was still active.
It was time to consider the situation from the point of view of the killer. What would I do if I had a camera capable of taking pictures of the past?
A wild idea, I knew. But not impossible, not in the sense that a camera able to take pictures of the future would have been. As an investigator, my entire job was investigating the traces people and their actions left behind them. Why should it be impossible that every photon left its own trace? And then, any scene could be reconstructed.
It explained everything. The camera could, for some reason, trace only the light from the sun. Similarly, its spatial frame of reference was tethered not to the Earth, but the sun, which meant that when you used the camera at a certain place, you took pictures of empty space unless you timed it just right — and used it for exact anniversaries. Because there were just a bit more than 365 days in a year — about a quarter of a day — the Earth would be turned by about a quarter once it was time to take a picture. Choosing the exact place and time to press the trigger was a headache of orbital mechanics, and it was no wonder that most of the pictures were from odd angles. Once you considered the difference in elevation, it was a wonder Sigur had managed to take usable pictures at all.
Which would mean it had happened like this: For whatever reason, the killer had broken into Sigur's home. Sigur had been quick to hide the picture when he heard someone come in, but he probably hadn't expected to be killed. The killer then found the camera, maybe in another room. It probably took them a while to understand what it could be used for. Then, they found a way to make money — likely a quicker, less circuitous one than art. A year after the killing, they were proficient with the camera and had quite a bit of money. On the anniversary of the murder, they took pictures of the crime scene, and saw Ian there. A quick image search later, they found Ian's memoir. Reading it, it became clear that Ian came quite a bit closer to the truth of the case than anyone else. Anyone who read the memoir knew that Ian wouldn't let a case as interesting as Sigur's rest, which is why he became a threat. And killing was easier and less risky now that the killer had acquired quite a bit of money.
I shook my head. I was starting to think like Ian, choosing the hypothesis that made for the best story without considering plausibility. Ordinarily, I wouldn't even have considered something as outlandish as an anniversary camera, but these weren't ordinary circumstances. Ian had been killed for following this trail. I had no doubt that he had thought along the same lines as me, at least once he had gotten the album from the auction.
I wasn't safe either. I had been Ian's partner, and he had mentioned me in his book in direct relation to the case. I had to act like the camera was trained on me the entire time. In no more than a year, whoever held the camera could have pictures of whatever I was doing right now. They could also watch the inside of the police department, showing them exactly who had seen the pictures. And I would be one of those people, even though the superintendent had only shown the pictures to me briefly. In the worst case, they would quickly come to consider me a risk, and I would be dead in a bit less than a year. Which meant that I had quite a bit more time than Ian, and that time could be used to get the killer.
They had information about the past, an enormous amount of money, and no scruples. I, on the other hand, had an information advantage in one narrow special case: they didn't know about anything that happened less than a year ago.
Almost a year later
Life was a matter of routine, especially the lives of others, Ernest knew. He'd had more than enough opportunity and ample motive to look into the routines of others. The foul-mouthed superintendent who had twice failed to catch him. Liu Wei, whom Ernest himself was unable to catch. And finally, there was Ian Jensen, two-bit-detective with delusions of being Sherlock Holmes, and his moron of an ex-partner, who, as far as Ernest knew, still had no clue about the camera.
Ian Jensen was the person of interest today. A year and six hours ago, he woke up as usual. Began his day at his computer with a cup of vile instant coffe. Today was a rare day in the sense that Ernest knew what had been on Ian Jensen's screen, though he couldn't take pictures of it. An auction for the legacy of Thom Sigur, including one particularly important photo album. Which Ian Jensen had then proceeded to snatch before his cup was empty.
Ernest took one picture per minute, as fast as the camera allowed. In the impromptu darkroom in the middle of the ship, he could look at the negatives almost in real time, every frame confirming his idea of the story. From time to time, a picture was entirely dark because Ernest's position had drifted into a wall. Sadly, it wasn't possible to lay anchor in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but that was the place where he had to be — Jensen's position a year ago plus about ninety degrees westward. The crew had strict orders to keep the ship in precisely one place, and for the most part, they did, though they were convinced he was just a rich eccentric who wanted his peace at sea.
At that moment a year and six hours ago, Ian Jensen was happy, the bastard. It took a special kind of idiot to blow that much money on a clue to a case he wasn't even allowed to work on anymore, but Jensen was that kind of idiot. He grinned like a child and seemed to be dancing in his chair.
Ernest distracted himself for a few minutes with his stocks. For about half a year, he had used the camera to make money; then, he had accumulated enough to never work again and focus all of his attention on not getting caught. And the one person with the highest likelihood of catching him was Liu Wei, the only one who could — maybe — be able to construct another camera and simply take a picture of the crime as it happened. Instant evidence. How furious Ernest had been when his surveillance of Sigur's expensive darkroom had shown Liu Wei just opening the door with a key as if he lived there, taking all the specialized equipment. After confirming that the camera was not there, he had done the smart thing and disappeared. If no one knew where you were, the camera wasn't worth anything. In a few weeks, Ernest would get a chance to trace Wei's steps again, but he would be surprised if that was successful.
It was far more worthwhile to go through Ian Jensen's files. This was Ernest's third day of doing so; he had caught Jensen in the middle of a sort of archive binge, a vast re-organization of his private files, for whatever reason. And just as Jensen leafed through the files, Ernest photographed, hoping that the self-proclaimed genius had found a trace of Wei when everyone else had failed. He had to have. The hitman Ernest had sent after Jensen a year minus a few days ago had found a half-written message to Wei on Jensen's computer, asking for a meet-up.
So far, nothing. But it couldn't be much longer; after all, tomorrow a year ago, Jensen would connect the dots and burn all his paper files. He had always been quick at jumping to conclusions.
There was a knock on the door.
"What is it?" Ernest shouted. The crew knew that he wasn't to be disturbed.
"Open up," a muffled voice on the other side of the door said, and Ernest recognized it even before it said "we have a warrant."
"How?", the killer asked on the way back to shore, and his grimace of incompetent anger was far too sweet not to gloat.
"Well," I said. "Turns out you don't need to lay a trap to spring it. You just need to find out that it exists and be at the right place in the right time."
"So you know where Wei is."
"No," I said, grinning widely. "And Ian didn't either. He wasn't that clever. But misleading you? Well within his abilities."
Then I shut up, because I didn't need to tell him how I had cut my ties with the investigation and laid low for almost a year just in case, how close I had been to giving up on the idea of Ian's trap, and how I had feared for my life the entire time through. I let him stew the rest of the way home.